Documentary relives innocent man's hell

The powerful thing about Michael Morton's story has always been how easy it is to put ourselves in his shoes, and how horrifying that would be.

His is an extraordinary tale of an ordinary man, 32, with no criminal record, a husband, the father of a 3-year-old, a grocery store manager, who left for work early one morning in 1986 and returned to his suburban Austin home to find it encircled in police tape, his wife brutally slain and himself charged with the crime days later.

We know how the story goes: Morton was convicted in 1987 and sentenced to life. Then, after 25 years of hard time, legal battles, hell and then deliverance with help from a heroic team of lawyers, he was exonerated in 2011.

But a documentary premiering in Houston next month at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, makes very real an innocent man's nightmare through a cruel and broken justice system that stole his freedom, his relationship with his son and, nearly, his spirit.

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Directed by Al Reinert, "An Unreal Dream: The Michael Morton Story" stirs us with its simplicity.

Unimaginable horrors are stripped of the drama and the noise and told through quiet interviews, softly strumming guitars and searing images. We see family photos and home videos of Christine Morton, sharing a moment with her husband or lovingly cradling her tiny blond son, Eric. We hear Morton recount why he fell in love with the smart, independent woman with dark hair and pale eyes

Morton, his attorneys and a couple of the jurors who found him guilty tell their stories from the stark wooden courtroom in Williamson County where Morton was convicted.

A case without facts

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WHAT _ "An Unreal Dream: The Michael Morton Story" followed by special Q&A with Michael Morton, director Al Reinert and longtime pro bono counsel John Raley

It's a solid place, with hard angles, ionic columns and flags. It's a place where an unscrupulous prosecutor, former District Attorney Ken Anderson, spun an imaginative case devoid of facts and material evidence and full of junk science, innuendo and perverse, fanciful theories. Morton had killed his wife, Anderson surmised, in a homicidal rage after she refused him sex on his birthday the night before.

Anderson fed the tale to the jury in an epic performance, with tears streaming down his cheeks.

Ironically, we learn that Morton's own naiveté about the system may have helped seal his conviction.

"Innocent people think that if you just tell the truth, you've got nothing to fear from the police. If you just stick to it, the system will work, it will all come to light, everything will be fine," Morton says in the film.

Because he couldn't imagine any jury convicting him without a shred of real evidence connecting him to the crime, Morton didn't show much fear, or much emotion at all, in the courtroom. And jurors noticed. His stoic disposition seemed to mesh with the ruthless, callous killer the prosecutors were trying to make him out to be.

"I guess I kept looking at Michael and just noticing that he didn't seem to have a lot of feeling about him," says one female juror, Lou Bryan.

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Lisa Falkenberg

The film also delves into the innocent man's experience in prison, with all its sounds, smells and indignities.

"Visitation is like oxygen," Morton explains, describing how it was one of the few reminders of normalcy, of a world beyond bars. For years, he looked forward to court-ordered, infrequent visits with his son. But as the boy grew older and began calling his sister-in-law "Mother," Morton could feel his son slipping away.

Eric describes how the visits and the letters from his father were like windows "into a life that never happened." To him, this man he believed had killed his mother "barely existed."

Finally, a teenage Eric told his father he didn't want to see him anymore. The boy cut off contact and changed his last name.

Religious experience

Morton hit rock bottom. He thought he had nothing else to live for and called out to God. He got no response until one evening, as he routinely scrolled the radio dial for music at bedtime, he came upon a Houston classical station playing harp music. Morton describes a deeply religious experience. He was floating weightless in his bunk, enveloped by boundless love, "in the presence of God."

That night changed his world. And so did his relationship with a Houston attorney named John Raley. In 2004, the New York-based Innocence Project, which was working on Morton's case at the request of his original lawyer, Bill Allison, asked Raley, a civil attorney, to come on board, in large part for his medical expertise gleaned from handling malpractice cases at the law firm of Raley & Bowick, LLP.

"There was nothing about this man that didn't speak to actual innocence," Raley says. He recounts how after meeting Morton he went home and told his wife, Kelly, "My God, he's innocent. We have to get him out." And she looked at him and said, " 'Then do it.' "

Raley filed a motion for DNA testing for Morton, but was thwarted at every turn by then-District Attorney John Bradley, an Anderson protégé. It took years of fighting before the DNA and other evidence proved Morton's innocence and pointed to the real killer.

In that time, Raley's pro bono quest for justice for Morton led to deep friendship between the men.

Raley says the documentary is a fitting tribute to a man and a case that have profoundly altered Texas justice. Anderson, who had gone on to become a state district judge, resigned after a court of inquiry and an arrest on felony evidence tampering charges. Morton successfully, tirelessly lobbied the Texas Legislature for an act in his name that requires prosecutors to share evidence with the defense.

Morton says he's grown from his experience. He's come to understand injustice, suffering, the wisdom of God. He's developed the kind of patience and grace that have helped him restore his relationship with his son.